Shanghai (28 page)

“There's more than enough light now.” Then she said the most extraordinary thing. “We all must live a little before we die, don't you think, Mr. Hordoon?” The light glinted in her green eyes.

“Oh, yes,” Richard responded, “before we marry a man twice our age, I think it wise to live a little.”

Her face took on a sudden, hard cast. She turned the light up full and stood. “I think it is time that I left.”

Richard reluctantly left the room, saying, “I'll get you a carriage to take you home.”

Rachel thought about that for a second and she began to laugh. No carriage could take her all the way home to Philadelphia. With Richard out of the room she
took the opportunity to search for signs of Maxi—but saw none.

Richard returned shortly and walked her outside to her conveyance. He was surprised to see two of her father's men, whom he recognized from his trek upriver. As the carriage drove away the two men continued to watch Richard, who mumbled under his breath, “Shit.”

Returning to his rooms, Richard sat in a corner and knocked gently on a panel. Lily came in with his ivory pipe and three balls of opium heated and ready. He arranged himself on the pillows, and Lily placed the first molten opium ball in the pipe's cup. He inhaled deeply and began his voyage.

The disfigured woman saw Richard's eyes turn back and knew he was beyond feeling, so she reached over and ran her fingers through his thick hair, leaned in close, and breathed in his maleness.

—

Richard was travelling. Alive inside the smoke. He tilted his hand up and he soared; then he breathed down and his feet touched the ground. Looking down he noted that he was wearing expensive leather shoes and that his leggings had been changed to elegant corduroy. He heard a tapping to one side and noticed that he held a pure ivory walking stick. He willed the stick up and his eyes followed. A large stone building faced him. In response to his command the end of the stick moved slowly around him in a wide arc. As the stick moved, he turned.

He was on a wide street filled with men and women and carriages and horses and large mercantile emporiums
selling all the goods of the world. A sputtering sound drew his attention. A metal carriage moved slowly toward him. A man with goggles held a wheel in his hands, but there were no horses to pull the vehicle. Richard felt his face crease with a smile. “Opium folly,” he said, or thought he said. He'd certainly experienced opium folly before. He turned around, pointed his stick forward, and moved down the elegant avenue. Then he recognized the old Asian oak tree that demarcated the end of his property line. He was on Bubbling Spring Road, but no longer was it a dirt path, prone to icy patches in the winter and mosquito-infested bogs in the summer. Now it was a high street to match any in London or Paris or Rome, filled with stores and fancy women and hotels.

Suddenly the thunder of horses' hooves at his back caused him to turn abruptly. And there, charging right at him, were half a dozen thoroughbred horses with men in their saddles whipping the horses into a lather. Richard held his hands in front of his face preparing for the concussion and marvelled as the horses swerved around him on all sides, leaving him completely untouched. He whooped and bent down, then sprang from his knees. And up he went. He was above a large racetrack, floating. Below him the thoroughbreds charged toward a large water jump on the back stretch of the track. The vast viewing stands were filled with people cheering. And he was there amongst them, shouting his heart out, screaming “Milo! Milo! Milo!” as his son guided his horse over the far jump.

It was a dream, he knew—but as Thomas De Quincy had implied in his early letters, sometimes the smoke dreams were precursors of the truth.

He sensed the weight of another molten orb of opium in his pipe and breathed deeply. He wanted to explore further the future that was right in front of him.

—

“Wake him up! Wake him up this very minute,” Maxi shouted at Lily. But Lily spoke little English, and Maxi's marketplace Mandarin always abandoned him in a crisis. Still, they understood each other well enough—not what was said, exactly, but the intent behind the words—the safety of the dreaming man.

—

In his stupor Richard watched a man and a woman yelling at each other on the elegant, paved streets of Bubbling Spring Road. The man was White, the woman Chinese. The Chinese woman's face was covered by a large floppy hat. The White man wore a top hat that bobbed as he spoke. “No Chinese or dogs, the sign says. Can't you read?”

Richard turned in the dream to see the sign. Who would post such a thing? But he'd lost control of the smoke and he found himself racing into a huge dry goods emporium. All around him people were shopping. Dresses, hats, high lace-up women's boots, corsets, and the other paraphernalia of an expensive ladies' shop climbed the walls in leaps and bounds of colour and fabric. Suddenly he was face to face with another sign, this one on a store wall. He was too close to read it so he stepped back. Slowly the sign came into focus: “Upstairs Ladies Have Fits.”

Richard began to laugh, and couldn't stop.

—

“What's he laughing about?”

The voice startled Lily. Its profound anger transcended language and made her scuttle away from the laughing man on the pillows on the floor.

“I repeat, what is the heathen laughing about?”

Lily blanched. Rachel's father and the two men from Oliphant and Company stood in the doorway. One carried a firearm, the other a massive club. Jedediah Oliphant carried no weapon, but his fury made him easily the most dangerous of the three.

“I didn't raise my daughter to end as a whore in the bed of a—”

He never got the last word out as he slumped forward and all hell broke loose in the chamber. Two gunshots sounded so loudly that Lily lost her already limited hearing, and the raw smell of gunpowder filled her nostrils. Then something red. And moving fast. A cry from a man. Another man hitting the floor with a thump, blood spurting from a third's nose as he fell to his knees.

Finally things seemed to clear and Lily saw Maxi, his red hair on end, standing alone over the three prone bodies.

“Now collect your foolish asses and don't come back here again. And if I even hear that you so much as raise your voice to your daughter I'll be there—your worst nightmare. You hear me?”

Oliphant nodded as he and his men beat a hasty retreat.

Maxi slammed the door behind them, then stepped forward and held out his hand to Lily. She took it and got up from the floor.

“It's okay, Richard is safe.”

She was grateful that there was no anger in his voice. “I'm …”

He put a finger to her lips. “It's okay. He's safe, Lily. Richard is safe.”

She felt the weight of his calloused hand in hers and found herself holding on to it tightly.

* * *

THE WIDOW SEAMSTRESS looked at her son, sallow, bone-showing thin, craven-eyed—lying in a pool of his own sweat on the floor mat. His shaven forehead was thick with stubble, his Manchu-required braid ratted with dirt and what looked like bits of floor tile. She leaned in. His mouth opened and formed the word
ya pian
—opium.

She remembered that mouth clasped around her breast sucking gently and the baby who looked up into her eyes, his chubby hands kneading and kneading her soft flesh. His sweet baby smell rising to her as she stroked his head.

So long ago
, she thought.
Forever ago
. She looked closely at her grown son, trying to find that child again. To find a remnant, a trace, a hint of what he had been before the smoke—so long before the smoke.

She shivered.

Crossing to the brazier she poked the embers with a stick, then noted that the coal she had bought only yesterday was almost all used up.
No, not used up
, she thought,
sold. He sold it
. He had already stolen everything else of hers that could be sold and had converted it into the dream smoke.

The sun was rising; another winter day was about to dawn. It would be the last day she dealt with the addiction of her son.

The young man moaned and the air filled with the acrid smell of his urine as it wet his pants, then found its way through the matting to the floor.

She nodded and for a moment wondered what would happen. Not here. No one would care here. But there—beyond. What would happen to her beyond?

The young man's mouth opened again and pleaded for
ya pian
.

She sighed.
Ya pian
, damnable opium.
Damnation fall upon those that brought this scourge here to the Bend in the River
.

Then she reached for the silk pillow that had been a gift from her mother on her wedding day and placed it over her son's face—and pressed with all her might.

She was surprised that he didn't struggle much. Surprised how easy it was to extinguish the life flame in an opium addict. Then, one more surprise, she began to cry. She watched as if they were someone else's tears landing on her son's very still face.

She walked over to her bed. From beneath the mattress she withdrew a Taiping pamphlet she had been given at the Bird and Fish Market almost two years ago. It was entitled
The Ways of God Explained to Man
. She folded the pamphlet carefully and put it in her belt. People had been talking about the success of the Taiping rebels from the mountains in northern Guangxi province. Talking about how they were going to rid the Middle Kingdom of the foreigners—and their damnable opium. How they needed every able-bodied person in their efforts. A woman who could kill her addict son would certainly be of use to such people.

She closed the door to her small home for the last time and took the first step on a long journey that
would bring her to the attention of the largest rebellion in the history of the world—the Taiping Revolt.

* * *

SHE WAS NOT the only person at the Bend in the River who was influenced by the Taiping pamphlets. It had taken Maxi several days to get the document translated, since he didn't want to use Chen or his men, and somehow he knew not to ask Richard's help. When he finally read the translation of the Taiping pamphlet an old familiar feeling took him. A feeling he had encountered on an opium farm, years ago, in far-off India.

Shanghai Summer 1848 to Late Fall 1852

“Because I had no food for my family,” the prisoner replied. Then he bowed his head, his chains rattled, and the muscles rippled across his broad back.

The Confucian had heard it over and over again in the past few years.

Just another thief,
the Confucian wanted to think, but he knew differently. He'd seen too many of them lately. Strong men—men who had fed their families and been loyal to the state and paid their taxes—now out of work. Judicially he didn't really have any choice. The man would be executed. Thieves, when caught and brought to the Confucian, were always executed. He
was about to pronounce his sentence when it occurred to him to ask, “What work did you do?”

“Canal work, your honour.”

“On the Grand Canal?”

“Yes, the First Emperor's canal.”

“And what did you do there?”

“I pulled barges. But there are no more barges.” His voice began to trail off as he repeated, “No more barges.”

The man is well spoken for a labourer
, the Confucian thought, but all he said was, “At dawn you will journey to the Hereafter,” as he had said so many times recently.

The guards hauled the condemned man to his feet and then, much to their surprise, the Confucian asked, “What's your name?” The canal worker offered up his name. The Confucian turned to the guards. “Keep him in custody. I don't want him executed, yet.” Before he could be questioned, the Confucian stood and left the chamber.

* * *

IN HIS STUDY later that day he pulled the ancient journal from its hiding place and added to the knowledge there. He was deeply troubled.

The arrival of the White Birds on Water had certainly changed many things at the Bend in the River. The darkness was intensifying. In fact, the village, no, the country itself was afloat (perhaps it would be more accurate to say adrift) in opium dens, opium users, and opium addicts. But it was not just the addicts or the addiction that caused such serious problems for the Middle Kingdom. Huge sums of Chinese silver left the country to pay for the opium. With the loss of so
much of China's national treasury, the Manchu powers in Beijing had begun to tax the peasants harder and mete out punishments more liberally to those who couldn't pay. Seldom did a day go by when the Confucian did not come across some poor man whose hands had been cut off, or who had been blinded, or locked into a heavy wooden board, his head and hands imprisoned through crudely cut holes. These pitiable souls were invariably led by a daughter or a wife who did her best to share the bolted and shackled weight, but to little avail.

As well, the countryside was filled with labourers who had no work. Q'in She Huang's Grand Canal, joining the mighty Yangtze River to Beijing, was virtually unused. Although Shanghai had not grown markedly, British manufactured goods, principally sold through Hong Kong and Canton, flooded almost every Chinese market, driving local producers out of business. Manchester's factory-made shirts, even after a three-thousand-mile sea voyage, were less than a third of the price of a locally milled and sewn garment. Thus thousands of strong, sometimes very strong, Grand Canal workers, used to pulling barges with their long cables for mile after mile, were now without work, without a way to feed their families.

Despite that, and the granting of extraterritoriality, not many of these workers made their way into Shanghai—just enough to run the
Fan Kuei
's businesses. Shanghai was still little more than a large town at the Bend in the River. There were more and more
Fan Kuei
every year but few more Chinese. “Only Chinese can build the Seventy Pagodas. But there are so few of us here,” the Confucian said aloud to his empty room.